My need to know unsated

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SAN DIEGO I've always had a thing for sailors.

My father, Karl, was one. A chief warrant officer. He served 20 years in the Navy before retiring in 1980.

I was never quite sure what he did on the aircraft carriers with the VFA-32 strike fighter squadron, though I saw the occasional photos of him on the flight deck, wearing canary yellow and a radio headset, and pointing jets in the direction of their parking spaces.

“I was a valet, except nobody ever gave me their keys,” he used to say.

Though I pestered him with a boatload of questions about where he went and what exactly he did all those months at sea, he rarely answered them in ways that satisfied my curiosities.

“Classified,” my father often said.

Oddly, I couldn't use that answer when he asked me about my first-grade report card. I learned early as a military kid that I had to be OK with not knowing, even though I was only 6 years old and believed I posed no national security risk.

(At one point, the secrecy made me wonder if “Smith” was really my last name. I'm still not absolutely sure.)

So, when an email popped in a few weeks ago from the Navy public affairs officer with the latest pitch about a hometown sailor, I jumped at a chance to get some of my lifelong questions and answers declassified.

A few blocks away from the USS Higgins in its home port of Naval Base San Diego, I met with Navy Ensign Brian Johnson.

Johnson, 34, spent his teens living around the corner from Buena Park High, graduated from there in 1997, enlisted in the Navy and never went back.

His childhood home was in Pico Rivera, near the railroad tracks and the rumbling trains that shook his room as they passed, five to six times a day.

He was fascinated by the power of trains. He built train sets, read train books and wanted to become a train engineer. He also wanted a ride to see the rest of the world.

During high school, while practicing the trumpet, he remembered, he saw a TV commercial about getting $40,000 for college by joining the military.

“Everybody joins the military for different reasons,” Johnson said. “That was mine.”

Four years and out, he thought. But after boot camp in Great Lakes, Ill., training in Virginia Beach, Va., getting stationed in San Diego, being a junior sailor aboard the USS Ogden, and playing point guard on the ship company's basketball team, Johnson realized he enjoyed Navy life.

“I had an exciting job, something new and challenging every day, shipmates I trusted, great views of the ocean, the smells, the clear nights of seeing stars and the moon, and the reflection time,” he said.

That was, of course, when he wasn't mopping floors and becoming a “stripping and waxing expert,” which isn't as exotic as it might sound.

In 2003, he signed up for shore duty and less menial labor, serving as a Navy recruiter in Norwalk for the next three years. He even signed up his stepfather, Clifford Lee Billington Sr., for the reserves.

Though he wanted to go to college, Johnson wound up recruiting himself into a naval career. In 2006, he began hovercraft training – “It wasn't for me,” he said – and asked to join a combat ship “to get into the nitty gritty of my job.”

That came on the USS Mobile Bay (CG-53), a guided-missile cruiser in San Diego. He remembered the first day, when the chief ordered him to stand at a certain attack station, saying, “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

Johnson immersed himself in learning about his new role and studied late nights to master the instruction manuals and war-fighting tactics with the same zeal he had felt as a boy discovering trains.

By 2011, he applied to become a commissioned officer, was selected, and dispatched to training in Rhode Island and Virginia. In September 2013, he was put on a plane to Japan to join the USS Higgins, a guided-missile destroyer that was returning from a western Pacific deployment.

“I met the crew at sea in an undisclosed location,” he said, raising one of my eyebrows.

The USS Higgins returned to San Diego in October and will remain for “I know but I can't say how long,” Johnson said.

He runs that ship's Combat Information Center, one of those dark rooms with 20 people huddled in front of computer monitors and radar screens like we civilians see in “Captain Phillips.”

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